COCOA: THE JOY AND THE TRAGEDY

Cookbook delivers the goodies, but doesn’t shy away from truth

Chocolate dwells in extremes. You might let a square of the high-quality craft variety melt slowly on your tongue, heady and slick, savouring its complex aromas.

Or it may take the form of a quick fix, an uncomplicated confection you hastily polish off, surrendering to the sugar rush.

Its path from a slim region straddling the equator to candy aisles around the world is likewise rooted in polarity: pleasure or pain, depending on where you’re situated in the supply chain.

Coveted the world over, cacao has been cultivated for millenniums. From godly beverage to ubiquitous candy bar, our collective chocolate craving is great, and its story has been fraught since the Spanish conquistadors first brought beans home from Mesoamerica. Refreshingly, in her latest cookbook, Cocoa (Quadrille, 2019), author Sue Quinn revels in the light without shying away from the dark.

Sweet and savoury recipes — fudgy, melting and rich — sit alongside a full examination of this extraordinary food: The realities of its history and production, the rise of fine chocolate (small-scale producers using carefully sourced, high-quality cacao beans), how to taste it like a connoisseur, how to buy and store it, its cultural significance, health benefits and the science behind it.

After all, she emphasizes, our enjoyment of chocolate can only be enhanced by gaining knowledge of its nature and origins. As much as it’s marketed as a harmless sweet, the provenance of the product is inseparable from exploitation, beginning with the colonizing forces of the 16th century to the child labour of today.

In West Africa, which produces roughly three-quarters of the world’s cacao, more than two million children work in often dangerous conditions on cacao plantations, Quinn writes.

The world’s largest chocolate companies, including Hershey, Mars and Nestlé, pledged to eliminate child labour almost two decades ago.

As The Washington Post recently reported, these companies are still unable to pinpoint where their cocoa comes from, much less make claims as to whether or not it’s the product of child labour.

“This is part of chocolate’s story. Unless you talk about it and inform people, we’re never going to address some of the issues that are involved in our massive appetite for chocolate, and what we’re doing to the planet and to other people,” says Quinn.

“If we’re going to eat chocolate, then we need to know the story behind it and the truth behind it … The chocolate story is a bit of a shameful story, but it’s not too late for us to try to do something by making better choices.”

Recipes excerpted from Cocoa by Sue Quinn, published in 2019 by Quadrille, an imprint of Hardie Grant Publishing.